Specific sound sources can be extracted from a set of microphone signals by means of beam-forming. To be able to deal with a wide range of scenarios, it is desirable to perform beam-forming using a subset of an unlimited number of microphones, and to organize these microphones by means of wireless communication.
To make such a system practical and scalable, the computations should be performed in a distributed manner across the network, rather than in a centralized processing center or “fusion center.” One algorithmic approach performs distributed processing but requires that all the nodes in the network be able to communicate to each other. As a result, the approach is not scalable nor does it allow for implementation in an arbitrary topology. Such an approach is therefore not practical for large systems.